


memories you bury or live by

by gabolange



Category: City Homicide (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21723724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/pseuds/gabolange
Summary: The closer to the truth, the easier it is to remember.CW: descriptions of human trafficking.
Relationships: Nick Buchanan/Jennifer Mapplethorpe
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	memories you bury or live by

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Tumblr prompt "Nick & Jen, conversations at the kitchen table."
> 
> With thanks to pellucid for the prompt and the read-through. Any errors are my own.

***

Their first assignment—before making contacts in the shipping industry, before infiltrating Hartono’s business, before making themselves indispensable—is to learn who they are. Not the notes about Trish and Wesley Claybourne that they have committed to memory (she: twenty-nine, he thirty-four, married five years, no children, etcetera), not the horrors of the world they will live in these next months (drugs and guns and money), but the details. 

Their cover, a marriage, rests on the details.

Nick—Wesley, he corrects in his head—sits at the Formica table in the house he will share with Trish—he does not know her real name—and raises his eyebrows. “Favorite food?” he asks.

She coughs a laugh. “The closer to the truth, the easier it is to remember,” Trish says, parroting back the advice their handler had given. “Trifle. And lamingtons.”

“Sweet tooth, huh?” Wesley asks, and it is easy to conjure a history there: more dessert than dinner at the wedding, that time when they were dating she dragged him out to the milk bar for candy. 

Trish shrugs. “I guess,” she says, a little shy, as if this isn’t a trait shared by half the world. “You?” she asks.

“Eh,” Wesley says. “Steak on the barbie,” and thinks less of the food but of his father corralling them all, the uncles and cousins tossing the football, the sister he won’t be able to speak to for six months or a year, the nephew who is too young to miss him. 

“Boring,” she says, and he might take offense but for the teasing note in her voice. He’ll make her steak soon, in this little kitchen in this little house, and begin to make this story something they can stand behind. 

“It’s our national pastime,” Wesley says. “I bet you love it, too.”

Trish grins, and Wesley thinks he likes her smile.

**

He learns that first week how she takes her coffee, what she likes for breakfast, that she dawdles in the morning and slides into her chair like she is tardy to school. “We don’t have to eat together,” he says, slurping at his cereal. 

The look on her face is wry at best, if not a little sad. “Breakfast together was the rule growing up,” she says, and he wonders when she last had a regular breakfast partner. After parents (he assumes), have there been boyfriends? Roommates? The slant to her brow tells him not to ask, and not to fight. 

“We can then,” he says. “If you want.”

**

“Why soy milk?” he asks her, two months in. She is parked at the table reviewing notes, tea growing cold at her side. He’s been trying to fix the radiator, which rattles to shake the house, either SIS’s negligence or Trish’s insistence on keeping it warm inside through the winter.

“My sister has a dairy allergy,” she says, not paying attention. Does Trish Claybourne have a sister? Was it in their notes, or is this for them to improvise as needed? He can barely remember now.

Wesley Claybourne has no family of note—parents in Hobart, retired to the seaside a long way away. Well, that’s what the file says, that’s what he should parrot now. But all the ways they aren’t supposed to know each other make it hard to find those points that might make their fake connection more real. Hartono will see through them in a minute, Wesley thinks.

“Sister?” he asks, putting down his tools and joining her at the table. 

She nods, bringing her hands to cup her tea. “Much older,” Trish says, committing to the story now. “When she would come home to visit, she would make us afternoon tea. Always her way, with soy.” He tries to imagine the woman across from him young, a little girl happy for her family’s attention, no matter that it meant choking down fake milk.

“Not coffee?” he asks. All the cops he knows—and he knows she is a cop—swear by coffee, the sludge they pour at the office, the brown water they pick up between calls on the streets. Coffee flows through their veins. Not hers, apparently.

“Keeps us both up,” she replies, she and her faraway big sister. “No caffeine after noon.”

“You’re a stronger man than me,” Wesley says, and might mean it.

**

She’s a passable cook and so is he, but they order in more often than not. The cardboard cartons let them work over dinner, trading notes, theories, observations. This day, they sat down with one of Hartono’s men to discuss everything they can do for him: guns, not handguns but real guns, Russian-made, military-grade. Kalishnikovs will never go out of style.

Wesley picks at his curry. “I want to know if there’s a bigger game,” he says. 

“Arms dealing isn’t big enough for you?” Trish asks.

He rolls his eyes. “There’s more to it than that.”

“Of course there is,” Trish says. “But in four months, we’re this far in. Guns and money, Wesley, you know that’s what we’re here for, and we can’t push too fast.”

Their progress is almost remarkable, he thinks. He doesn't have to wonder how they did it: Trish has charmed every man she meets with a smile so sly he wouldn’t know it was fake except for the way she bangs into the bathroom at home after every party, turning the shower on hot to scrub off their breath, their gaze, their hands. She is the bait, drawing them closer, making introductions: “Oh, and have you met my husband?” And then Wesley seals the deal—all business acumen, and just enough charm.

“No,” he says, watching her eat. The person she is between these walls—this casual woman inhaling her dinner, pushing him to think clearly, go slowly, be prudent—he wonders how much it costs her to hide her intelligence, pretend to be a pretty face, listening all the while. She is the best kind of spy, he knows, but after four months he can see the ways her eyes tighten when they make their plans, and he hopes she can do this for as long as they need her.

He hopes it isn’t too long. For her sake.

**

There’s more to it than that. They knew that much, but not the details, not the sordid horror of it. Maybe they had started to fill in the blanks with their own worst nightmares, but for all they had gotten inside, it wasn’t close enough.

A shipping container full of girls. Girls, nine, ten, eleven years old. Packed in so tight they could barely move or sleep or breathe. Some of them couldn’t breathe, and their bodies have been shoved to the back of the box, slowly rotting while the others huddle on the other side. The space between has become their toilet, their waste a wall between the living and the dead.

Trish and Wesley watch the news on the little television in their kitchen. The cops are there. The cameras are right behind them, taking in the frightened little faces, the pile of hands and arms and hair. 

They would rip the ringleaders to pieces, but they don’t know where to start. They have no evidence, nothing to tie Hartono or anyone else back to this. There are just whispers from their contacts to go quiet, the hints of anger and loss. The loss: there was so much money in those girls, each of whom would fetch a pretty price. That one was fair, that one young. From the Philippines, Singapore, the best the Asian market could offer. 

“Christ,” Trish says. She shakes her head, can barely form a sentence. “You know—you hear about—it shouldn’t be a surprise, but—.” 

“It’s different when you see it,” Wesley says.

Her mouth forms a wobbly line. “It’s different when it’s people you know,” she says, because proof or no, she knows who was behind this. They both do. She waves a hand at the screen, where the camera lingers on one child’s wide eyes and slack cheeks. “We have been working with this organization for six months. We ate at their tables, they ate at ours.” Her eyes brim with angry tears. “We know their children. How could they?”

“You knew it was worse,” Wesley says, because he had started to put it together, had suspected that the men who are scattered to the wind—or at least to their safe houses with their false passports—traded in human bodies as much as weapons. “You knew it was this.”

She slumps back in her chair and reaches for the remote. The television clicks off and the room goes quiet. “I know,” she says, drawing her hand through her hair. She looks at him sharply now, hurt and angry. “But to do this to kids, it’s horrifying, Wesley. And it is different to imagine than to see.” She takes a breath. “And it is different when it is faceless evil than when it’s a man you’ve shared a drink with.”

He nods, and reaches his hand to cover hers. They have been sharing this house, a bed, for six months, and still they have barely touched. Her fingers are cool to the touch. “I know,” he says, squeezing her hand.

She wraps her hand around his. “How can anyone do this to kids?” she asks again, plaintive.

He has no answer.

**

Two weeks later, Trish and Wesley Claybourne are arrested for arms dealing with half of Hartono’s crew. There is no evidence for trafficking, but more than enough for everything else. They go down for the guns and then back to their lives.

They don’t get one last breakfast together.

**

He meets Jen Mapplethorpe at a party. He is shocked to find her here, in Matt’s kitchen, but not at all that she has made her way to this squad; he remembers her anger, the way it refused to harden. On the last night, she had turned her head toward his in the dark: “I will never stop fighting for kids like those,” she said, her breath close against his skin.

In Homicide, she can fight as hard and as long as she wants. 

He wonders how she likes it, if it exhausts her or if it excites her, what she has lost to the bodies and the families and the perpetual sorrow. He doesn’t have to ask if she finds it worthwhile—that much, he knows.

But who has she become in the years since he knew her? That startled smile doesn’t belong to Trish Claybourne: it is more guarded, more fearful than he would have expected, and he wonders if her shock will fade to joy, what they might be in another month or six. 

Work mates, at the very least, except for all the little things he knows about her, and she about him: how she takes her coffee, the way she curls her fist under her chin when she sleeps, her raging fury.

He wonders if she has thought of him. He hadn’t known, until this minute, how much he missed her. 

He shakes her hand and gives her his name.

***


End file.
